Staff Software Engineer - AI Products

Staff Software Engineer, Cortex AI Infrastructure

Snowflake

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. The Cortex Apps team is building the future of AI for enterprise data. This role focuses on the backend infrastructure that powers our flagship products like Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Agents and Search making agentic AI fast, reliable, scalable and secure at the enterprise level. You won’t just be using AI tools; you will be building the high-performance systems that orchestrate them. You’ll own and influence the architecture for agent execution environments, high-throughput context retrieval, or the ecosystem that allows our customers to iterate and launch agents in production. WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS ROLE: * Architect Agentic Runtimes: Build and scale the orchestration engines that execute complex agentic workflows, ensuring low-latency tool execution and robust state management. * Scale Context Engineering Infra: Design high-performance systems for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), including vector database integration, scalable and efficient search indexing, query processing, and result ranking, semantic caching, and automated metadata extraction. * Build the "Evals Engine": Develop the automated infrastructure required to run massive-scale golden set simulations, error analysis pipelines, and "hillclimbing" experiments. * Productionize AI Workflows: Collaborate with the modeling team to take raw LLM capabilities and turn them into hardened, multi-tenant microservices with strict guardrails and observability. * Optimize Performance & Cost: Direct the infra strategy for model routing, prompt caching, and token optimization to ensure Snowflake’s AI features are the most efficient in the industry. REQUIREMENTS: * Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field. * Experience: 5+ years of experience building distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products. * Technical Stack: Deep proficiency in Go or Java (for systems) and Python (for AI orchestration). * Systems Thinking: Strong understanding of database internals, distributed state management, and cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, FoundationDB, etc.). * Domain Expertise: Familiarity with the "plumbing" of AI: vector indices, agent platforms, and building scalable data pipelines. (BONUS) EXPERIENCE WITH: * Query optimization and SQL engine internals. * Designing multi-tenant systems that handle sensitive enterprise data at scale. * Developing search infrastructure for large-scale applications. * Direct experience with any of the subsystems outlined above. Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee’s duty to keep customer information secure and confidential. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake. How do you want to make your impact? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com

Principal AI Software Engineer - Snowflake Intelligence

Snowflake

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. ABOUT THE ROLE The Cortex Apps team is defining the future of AI for enterprise data. Our mission is to transform how the world’s largest enterprises interact with their data through flagship products like Snowflake Intelligence. As a Principal AI Engineer, you will be a technical North Star for our AI initiatives. You won't just execute on a roadmap; you will help define it. You will tackle the most complex, "frontier" problems in agentic reasoning, NL-to-SQL, and enterprise-scale RAG, ensuring our AI products are not only innovative but fundamentally reliable and scalable for the Fortune 500. WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS ROLE: * Technical Strategy & Architecture: Define the long-term technical vision for Snowflake Intelligence. Lead the architectural design of multi-agent systems, complex tool-use frameworks, and self-correcting NL-to-SQL engines. * Drive Industry-Leading Reliability: Move beyond simple evals to build world-class, automated "hill-climbing" infrastructure. You will establish the methodology for how Snowflake measures and guarantees LLM performance across diverse customer schemas. * Cross-Functional Influence: Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to align AI capabilities with business goals. You will bridge the gap between Research (modeling) and Production (infra), ensuring the latest LLM breakthroughs are viable at Snowflake scale. * Ecosystem Thinking: Design extensible "context engineering" patterns—including advanced function calling and semantic layer integration—that can be leveraged by other Snowflake teams and external developers. * Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Act as a force multiplier. You will mentor Staff and Senior engineers, lead cross-functional "strike teams" on high-stakes projects, and foster a culture of technical excellence and rapid experimentation. REQUIREMENTS: * Experience: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years specifically leading the deployment of LLM-based applications at massive scale. * Education: Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, AI, or a related field. * Expertise: Deep, "under-the-hood" understanding of LLM orchestration. You should be an expert in prompt optimization, semantic modeling, and building robust guardrails for non-deterministic systems. * Systems Thinking: Proven track record of designing complex systems that integrate AI with traditional data stacks (SQL, Retrieval Systems, Semantic Layers). * Communication: Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical trade-offs to both executive leadership and ICs. You are as comfortable in a design doc as you are in a boardroom. * Proven Impact: You have previously held a "Principal" or equivalent high-level IC role, or have led the technical launch of a major AI product used by millions. ABOUT SNOWFLAKE Snowflake is the AI Data Cloud. We aren't just shipping "wrappers"; we are building the foundational intelligence layer for the world’s data. Join us as we scale Cortex, including Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Agents, Analyst, and Search—to define the next decade of enterprise computing. Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake. How do you want to make your impact? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com

Staff Software Engineer - Applied Performance Group

Snowflake

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. The Applied Performance Group (APG) Engineering team provides a highly strategic function at Snowflake, with direct impact to our product direction, as well as to our bottom line. APG engineers are a key bridge between Engineering and our Sales organization, support organization, and other engineering organizations at Snowflake. They are called on to help with our most challenging customer performance issues, and help deliver some of our biggest deals. In addition, APG plays a strategic role in competitive benchmarking, defining and/or utilizing industry benchmarks to compare Snowflake performance against our competitors. APG Engineers are at the cutting edge of innovation at Snowflake, pioneering Snowflake deployments with the newest technology and working with Engineering and Product Management to continuously improve the product and ensure we continue building the best Cloud Data Platform in the industry. A successful Applied Performance Engineer will have a broad range of skills and experience ranging from strong SQL skills, data warehousing, data architecture, data engineering, transaction processing, security, performance analysis, analytics, etc. He/she will have the insight to make the connection between a customer’s specific business problems and Snowflake’s solution, the customer-facing skills to communicate that connection and vision to a wide variety of technical and executive audiences, and the technical skills to be able to not only build and execute proof-of-concepts and benchmarks, but also to provide consultative assistance in areas of product direction. The person we’re looking for shares our passion about reinventing the data platform and thrives in the dynamic environment. That means having the flexibility and willingness to jump in and get done what needs to be done to make Snowflake and our customers successful. It means keeping up to date on the ever-evolving technologies for data and analytics in order to be an authoritative resource for both Snowflake and customers. And it means working collaboratively with a broad range of people both inside and outside the company. RESPONSIBILITIES: * Be an expert on the topics of Snowflake architecture, query processing, workload profiling, data engineering, and Snowflake tools * Be an expert in competitor solutions/products for analytics and data engineering * Define, automate, execute, and publish competitive benchmarks * Partner closely with other engineering teams to deliver both results and guidance on performance gaps, challenges, advantages, and disadvantages * Collaborate with Product Management and Engineering to continuously improve Snowflake’s products and eco-system roadmaps. OUR IDEAL APPLIED PERFORMANCE ENGINEER WILL HAVE: * Minimum 5 years of experience in technical role delivering Database, Data Warehouse, or Data Engineering implementations and/or benchmark initiatives * Experience and ability to work directly with other engineering teams, product managers, and various levels of management * Strong communication skills, able to effectively communicate ideas and technical concepts to both technical and executive audiences * Broad understanding of cloud platforms and solutions, including experience and understanding of large-scale infrastructure-as-a-service platforms (e.g. Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack) * Proven track record of experience with Snowflake competitors * Deep understanding of complete data engineering and analytics stack and workflow, from data ingestion and load to transformation to data platform design to BI and analytics tools * Deep technical expertise in databases, data warehouses, data processing, and applications * Coding/programming experience in process automation * Strong SQL performance analysis experience, Python and/or Java expertise, and the ability to use tools to identify and articulate performance issues STRONGLY DESIRED: * Extensive knowledge of and experience with large-scale databases and distributed data processing technology (e.g. Databricks, Spark, Netezza, Oracle, Teradata, Greenplum, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Synapse, Postgres, Apache Spark, Ray, Dask, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, etc.) * Software development experience with C/C++, Java, Scala, Spark * Scripting experience with Python, Ruby, Perl, Bash * Knowledge of and experience with AI and Machine Learning technologies either in use (eg. using a coding assistant), or in development (eg. using technologies like PyTorch for training and inference). * University degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics or related fields, or equivalent experience. Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake. How do you want to make your impact? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com